From the article all I gathered was that you’re essentially right.

In more general terms:

A distributed reverse proxy with sensible defaults for caching.

Even though it doesn’t sound like much, it’s pretty cool and useful.

One of the things in ops that can be hard and expensive is any kind of high availability. Say you’re restarting your origin server regularly after pushing new code.

Depending on your use case, it might just be enough to have exactly two well provisioned web servers (VM/dedicated) and maybe one DB server. Then put a CDN in front of it and voila, high availability reads.